“I’ve just got to make this one, you know?” he said. “If I don’t make it this time, I don’t think I ever will.”
“I’m not sure I follow you,” I said.
“Look, Dan,” he said, “let’s not kid each other. I know what I am — I’m a big fuckin’ kid — that’s what I am.”
“Hey, man —”
“No, let’s not shit each other. I wouldn’t say this to any of the others. Hell, they wouldn’t understand it. But you’re different.” He lit a cigarette and then immediately mashed it out. “I sure as shit don’t need those things.”
“I’ve cut way down, too,” I said, wanting to change the subject.
“This whole damn trip,” he went on, “it’s a kid thing — for me anyhow. At least it was when it started. It was just another of the things I do with your brother and Carter and McKlearey and a whole bunch of other guys — parties, booze, broads, the whole bit — all kid stuff. I gotta do it though. You see, my old man was fifty-five when I was born. My old lady was his second wife. I can’t ever remember him when he wasn’t an old man. I get this awful feeling when I get around old people — like I want to crawl off and hide someplace.”
“You’re not alone there,” I told him. “I ever tell you about the Dan Alders’ curse? With me it’s old ladies on buses. Drives me right up the wall every time.”
He grinned at me briefly. He almost looked like the old Cal again.
“So I hang around with young guys,” he went on, “and I do the stuff they do. Shit, man, I’m forty-two years old, for Chrissake! Don’t you think it’s time I grew up? I own four businesses outright, and I’m a partner in about six more. Let’s face it, I’m what they’d call a man of substance, and here I am, boozin’ and partyin’ and shackin’ up with cheap floozies like that goddamn Helen. Jesus H. Christ! Claudia’s ten times the woman and about a million times the lady that pig was on the best day she ever saw.” He shook his head. “I’ve gotta be outa my goddamn rabbit-ass mind!”
“We all do funny things now and then,” I said, wishing he’d change the subject.
“I don’t know why the hell Claudia puts up with me,” he said. “She knows all about it, of course.”
“Oh?”
“Shit yes! Do you think for one minute I could hide anything from her? But she never gives me hell about it, never complains. Hell, she never even mentions it. The goddamn woman’s a saint, you know mat?”
“She’s pretty special,” I agreed.
Sloane looked out over what Mike used to call the Big Lonely.
“God, it’s great up here,” he said, “if only I could get my goddamn wind!” He pounded his fist on his leg as if angry with his gross body for having failed him.
“Anyway” — he picked it up again —”like I was sayin’, this started out as just another kid thing — something I was gonna do with Jack and Carter and some of the guys, right?”
“If you say so,” I said. He had me baffled now.
“Only it isn’t that anymore. This is a, baby. This is where little Calvin grows up. This time I make it over the hump. By God, it’s about time, wouldn’t you say? Claudia deserves a real husband, and by God I’m gonna see that she’s got one when I get back. He looked up at the sky again. “This time I’m gonna make it, I really am.” Then he started coughing again, and I started worrying.
After he got straightened around with his breathing apparatus again, we got up and went back to the horses.
“You mink I can make it, Dan?” he asked after I’d helped him back on his horse.
I looked at him for a minute. “You already have, Cal,” I said. “That was it back there. Anything else is just going to be a souvenir to remember it by.” I went over and climbed up on Ned. A guy can say some goddamn foolish things sometimes. But Cal needed it, so I said it — even though we both knew “growing up” doesn’t happen like that. It takes a long time — most of your life usually.
Then we heard the other guys yelling farther up the slope. We nudged the horses over to where we could get a clear view of the ravine. We both looked up and down the opposite ridge for a minute and then we saw what they were yelling about.
It was a white deer.
He was a buck, maybe about a seven-pointer, but he wasn’t as big as the five-point we’d seen earlier. His coat was a sort of cream-colored, but his antlers were very dark. He stood about a quarter of a mile away on the other ridge, his ears flickering nervously at all the shouting the others were doing. I suppose like most albinos, his eyes weren’t really too good.
“Look at that!” Sloane said reverently. “Isn’t that the most beautiful goddamn thing you ever saw?” He handed me his binoculars. They brought the thing up pretty close; they were damn good glasses.
The deer’s eyes were a deep red, so he was a true albino. You could actually see the pink skin in places where the wind ruffled his fur back. He looked more completely defenseless than any animal I’ve ever seen. For some reason, when I looked at him, I thought of Clydine.
I gave the glasses back to Sloane and sat on the horse watching until the deer’s nerves finally got wound too tight and he bounded off across the other ridge and out of sight.
“Isn’t that something?” Cal gasped.
“Never seen one before,” I said. “I’ve seen a lot of deer, but that’s the first white one I’ve ever seen.”
“The son of a bitch looked like a ghost, didn’t he?”
“Or like Moby Dick,” I said, and then I wished I hadn’t said it. It was so goddamn obvious.
“Yeah. Moby Dick,” Sloane said. “They got him at the end of the book, didn’t they?”
“No,” I said. “He got them — the whole damn bunch. All but Ishmael, of course.”
“I never read it,” Sloane admitted. “I saw the movie though — first half of it anyway. I was with this girl —”
“I’d rather you didn’t mention that name to the others,” I said, forgetting Stan for a moment.
“What name?”
“Moby Dick.”
“Why not?”
“It’s a real bad scene, man. Just say it’s a superstition or something, but don’t get Jack and McKlearey started on something like that. Somebody’s liable to wind up dead.”
“You are jumpy,” Sloane said. “What’s got you all keyed up?”
“Man, I’ll tell you, this whole damn trip is like setting up housekeeping on top of a bomb. McKlearey’s been playing McKlearey-type games with a couple women we both know. If we don’t keep a lid on things, Jack and Stan are going to go off in a corner and start to odd-man to see who gets to shoot the son of a bitch.”
“Jesus!” Sloane said.
“Amen, brother, amen. This whole trip could turn to shit right in our faces, so let’s not buy trouble by starting any Moby Dick stuff. That son of a bitch sank the whole goddamn boat, and I left my water wings at home.”
“Hell,” he squawked, “I can’t even swim.”
Of course the first thing Stan said to me when Sloane and I came trailing into camp was “Call me Ishmael,” in a properly dramatic voice.
“I only am escaped to tell thee,” I grated back at him just as hard and as sharp-pointed as I could make it, hoping to hell he’d get the point.
“What the hell are you two babblin’ about?” Jack demanded.
Stan, of course, had to tell him.
We unsaddled the horses, turned them loose in the corral, and then all went on up to the fire where Clint was working on lunch.
“Man” — Jack was still carrying on about the white deer — “wasn’t that the damnedest thing you ever saw?”
“Pretty damn rare,” Miller said. “Most likely a stag though.”
“Stag?” Sloane asked. “I thought any buck-deer was a stag.”
“Well, not really,” Miller said. “A stag is kinda like a steer with cows. Either he’s been castrated or had an accident or he just ain’t got the equipment. Most of them freaks are like that — I don’t know why.”
They talked about it all the way through lunch. I kept trying to pour cold water on it, but I could see all the others visualizing that white head over their mantelpieces or what-not. I began right about then to hate that damned deer. I wished to hell he’d fall off a cliff or something.